1016
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
1016 points (99.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26280 readers
908 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Sigh... the notion that bikes are just toys or exercise equipment is such a harmful misconception, it's ridiculous. Rather than writing a huge wall of text trying to explain the vast depths of how important cycling is I'll just cite this blog post this blog post that explains it better than I can.
Of course, that article was written from an individual perspective, so even it manages to understate how important cycling is. Americans' dismissal of cycling in favor of driving, and the car-dependent [sub]urban design that results from that choice, is the underlying cause for the housing crisis and all the other crises that stem from that!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
That's by far the biggest issue (which I say not to diminish the others, but just to emphasize how bad this one is). The sheer space that cars take up in terms of roads and parking lots makes it practically impossible to design a city capable of accommodating them without ruining it for walking/biking/transit by having to spread destinations too far apart. We literally bulldozed thriving downtowns to make room for them (compare: Houston 1938 vs. Houston 1978)!
On top of that, cars are responsible for facilitating the literal Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. In short: subdivisions full of single-family houses with a lot of street frontage per housing unit generate less tax value per unit area than the infrastructure connecting them costs to maintain, making them inherently unsustainable financially (let alone ecologically, etc.).
Because Americans urban planners in the '50s had a hard-on for cars instead of taking bikes seriously as transportation, almost all of North America and increasing parts of the rest of the world are now fundamentally built wrong in a way that destroys health, the economy, and the environment all at once, and it'll cost trillions of dollars to fix it.
I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: ditching bikes in favor of cars may vary well have been the biggest disaster in the history of the world.